Protect The Dolls 64

It’s not that she was the first, it’s that I believed she was because everything was fresh and different. There had never been someone like her before, and so of course she was never going to be perfect. No one had even dared to be a disaster. She was new, all hard angles and clumsy shoulders, and she was strange. How her body jutted out in the middle, begging you to hold it where it didn’t feel right or natural. In time, it would become comfortable, natural even, as all new and imperfect things can if you love them enough. She could become beloved, and beautiful.

The first time I held a Nintendo 64 controller it was unnatural. The manual gave examples of different ways to hold it; by the arms on its side where they had been on controllers before her, or with one hand on its centre handle, with a ball-jointed control stick at the end. This extra appendage that all other controllers before her had lacked. I was raised with simple truths, a directional pad on one side, and a few buttons on the other. Tapered to fit comfortably in anyone’s hands. Over time the sweat of my palms changed the colour where I’d gripped them too tightly, or for too long. This was different, and confusing because it was new and because it was unknown and these are terrifying words to anyone who was led to believe that things will always be the same. That palms will always rest where they should, only now there was an extra stick to hold, and how could my palms rest easy when there was something extra to hold?

It’s not that I was the first either, it’s that I didn’t know any others. I knew because movies and TV talked and made jokes about my desires. If you watch any seasoned sitcom long enough, there will be a joke about a transsexual woman. She will be confusing, often terrifying, to bodies that some would consider normal, but she will be different, and in that way she will be beautiful. She will linger in the brain of anyone who is curious enough, as they always did for me. If a transsexual woman could be a joke it meant she had to be real, but there were none in my world to offer guidance. I don’t think I ever wanted to be perfect, I just wanted to understand how my body might be different from the others, even if it meant I might be made of clumsy pieces and added parts.

I bought my first Nintendo 64 in 1998, sold it six months later to buy a Playstation, only to go back on my word and buy a translucent jungle-green Nintendo 64 again in 1999. It was my little hearts desire, a special edition console that came with Donkey Kong 64, a video game that opens with the DK rap, a rap song about monkeys that introduces each member of the extended Kong family. In the years between the Playstation had adopted their own analog sticks, but they were normal, on the sides of the controller where you expected them to be, and I had missed the clumsy fiddling of the Nintendo 64. I liked that it was different. That it asked me to rethink how I held things in my hand, and what they could do. It didn’t want to be perfect, anyone could be perfect, it wanted to be something else.

Once I had learned how it worked, it became part of me. When we skipped school to get high and a little drunk at our friends house, whose mom was never home and always left the liquor cabinet open, we traded off controllers for Goldeneye, and all of us who were different seemed to be better at it. As if we knew what to do with added parts that others cursed and struggled with. “Why can’t they just make a normal fucking controller?” Someone would yell, before storming off to mix too much vodka with not enough anything else.

But I knew her because when I held her I understood her. Playstation controllers, and all the others, felt normal because they were supposed to, but the angles of a Nintendo 64 controller were different. They asked more of me. They confused me. They were weird, and off-putting, and uncomfortable at times. They were never perfect, and they were beautiful for it. People made jokes about them, and it only made me love them more. These strange, three-legged beasts of the land. How clumsy and shitty they were. How they would never be as good as idealized perfection, and how that never seemed to matter. In time, they would fade and become something new, again and again, until the present where all things are homogenous.

Companies like Analogue have made a new version of the N64, with a “better” controller, they’ve taken the extra parts and added things and reconstructed them into a more streamlined body, more in line with expectations. Not perfect, as they control the same and work the same, but more comfortable. It’s important that I knew my body first as this clumsy, awkward thing. That I hated parts of it, and learned to love and work with them regardless. That I found how the parts of me that made me different made me beautiful, not to everyone but to those that mattered. That when I chose to shift and change my own body, I did so because I wanted to and because I needed to, and not because I thought they would make me perfect. That I was able to access them safely and with great support is a blessing we should all have.

We were meant to be different in our way, and even now, after all these years, all my surgeries and recreations, my own shifting body will never be perfect. It will confuse some and become a joke to others. It will be built of hard angles and clumsy shoulders. Unnatural maybe, though that hardly matters. What matters is that in the right hands, it’s made beautiful for all its confusing angles and added parts.

I wrote about "Maps" for Paste Magazine, you can read it here.

“Maps” is a love song, it’s just that “love song” isn’t enough. A love song implies a simple truth, but love is a shapeless thing given boundaries by each new person. It’s not a song about being in love, it’s a love song about knowing you won’t always be.

“I Do” Teens in Trouble

It was, despite being November, 20-something degrees yesterday when I was walking Bowie through the park at lunchtime. The leaves were on the ground, the sun was shining, and I was regretting having decided to wear an outfit that included a light, but still warm, long black jacket. If there is a silver lining in a cloud of climate change, it affords more opportunities to feel like songs are still being made for the summer, as the summer might never truly end. The sun is shining, and we’re wearing bare arms on the street, and I’ve been loving this track by Teens In Trouble when I’ve been out confronting the sun lately. Here’s something in a walking song maybe, that’s upbeat but never too fast, boisterous but never brash. I just love a song that linger behind me as I move through the calm moments of the day, that lingers and becomes a vocal tick when left to my own devices. When I was in the grocery store looking for potatoes and clementines, without headphones and burdened with a busy mind I found myself humming the hook. The cynic in me loves the opening line too, where Lizzie Killian sings I’m fine, actually, nevermind, rememberin’ why I was mad. Good tune, and it's the start of my November is Melting playlist.